HOLY WARS: 3000 Years of Battles in the Holy Land

GARY RASHBA
Book Number: 85031
Product format: Hardback

The Holy Land, an area stretching between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, has been disputed territory throughout history. The author of this fascinating book describes 17 notable battles in the region, from the Israelite conquest of the Promised Land around 1400 BCE to the Bekaa Valley conflict in the 1982 Lebanon War. The Israelites' plan for capturing Canaan hinged on the need to take the city of Jericho, which had withstood numerous sieges, and archaeologists have confirmed that, for whatever reason, the walls fell down as in the biblical account. In the first century BCE Judaea became a vassal state of Rome, with violent consequences a century later under the emperor Vespasian, and from the 7th century CE the land was part of the Muslim empire. In the Middle Ages there were battles not only between crusading Christians and Muslims but also between the Ottoman and Mamluk empires. Among Napoelon's notable defeats was his Holy Land Campaign of 1799, ending his dreams of conquest in the east, while in World War I the Allied forces in Palestine, unlike their colleagues involved in static trench warfare, fought a mobile and strategic campaign. The author concludes with the Six Day War, the Yom Kippur War and the Lebanon War. 280pp, photos.